Holly Robinson

Holly Robinson (no, not Holly Robinson-Peete - the Autism advocate/actress/model/athlete's wife) works as a "staging expert" for a national real estate company, who has recently moved from a fast-paced metropolitan area to a slower-paced suburbia. In her spare time she keeps an online journal of the differences in these two worlds, and how she manages to keep a toe hold in each. Her topics often include "what you can live without" and "life's must-haves," - life simplification without sacrifice - which she has learned through her profession.

Politicians love to promise one thing to their constituents more than anything else—change. They do not always specify whether that change will be good or bad, but they do promise that it will happen. One change that has been proposed by lawmakers in Georgia will mean a little more work for self storage facility operators, but could also mean an increase in...

Work is not necessarily meant to be a loud of laughs. It does not wait for you to decide to grace it with your presence; it has to get done with or without you regardless of how pleasant or unpleasant the work environment is. That being said, the better your work environment is the more likely your people will want to come to work.
They more they come to work, the better...

There is one way to insure that your business is going to be healthy enough to stick around, a consistent number of customers. If you have at least a base number that you can count on than you know that you will at least be bringing ‘X’ amount of revenue every month. When you at least have that base level then you can decide how aggressive you need to...

One thing that kids don’t really think too much about is where things come from that they need or use on a daily basis. The vast majority of things of course are provided by Mom and Dad, but what about all the things that the community provides (parks, library, etc) or what if Mom and Dad are not able to do all the things they would like to for their kids?
That is...

There comes a time in every business effort where you will find that you are in dire need of new customers. For the self storage industry that could mean that you recently had a number of customers move out for whatever reason or maybe you were able to add on to your current structure and are now having trouble filling your new units.
Finding new customers will of course...

For years there has been talk about the nation trying to break its dependence on foreign oil. With gas prices near or above the three dollar mark for the last few years there are more and more people becoming interested in electric cars. The need for alternative forms of energy reaches far beyond the automobile industry though.
In a down economy like the United States...

Typically when people think of self storage units they think about that creepy guy at the end of the street with all the stuff stacked on his porch; when you look through the windows you can see that there is stuff everywhere. Rumor has it that the house and property were once beautiful, but the current occupant just has too much stuff.
Sounds like the perfect customer...

There is one thing that is really frustrating about the law. Even though it is in place to protect us from others and in some cases protect us from ourselves it can be a pain in the neck to understand. Too often, especially for small business owners like those in the self storage industry, we don’t know we did something wrong until it is too late and we have to pay...

There is one thing that people hate to spend money on, but would not ever do without—insurance. We get insurance for our health, our teeth, and our cars. We get insurance on packages we send through the mail of significant value. Depending on the type of work your in there are several other types of insurance that people buy all the time, often spending a lot of...

A common saying in business and in life goes something like this,” If you want to succeed, you have to be willing to go the extra mile.” That could not be truer for an industry than it is for the self storage industry. On the surface it may appear that succeeding in the self storage industry would be a pretty simple thing to do. All you need is a building with...